It's your move: Board games are back

Patrons of the Randolph Pub gather to play board game That’s Life on Thursday January 09, 2014.Pierre Obendrauf
/ The Gazette

Gamers play a game of Magic during a tournament night at Chez Geeks board game boutique in Montreal Monday January 6, 2014.Vincenzo D'Alto
/ The Gazette

Left to right, Alex Steve Paquet, James Simionato, an employee, and David Sem play a game of Magic during a game night at Chez Geeks board game boutique in Montreal Monday January 6, 2014.Vincenzo D'Alto
/ The Gazette

Gamers play a game of Magic during a tournament night at Chez Geeks board game boutique in Montreal Monday January 6, 2014.Vincenzo D'Alto
/ The Gazette

Marcus Maedler, left, David Sem and James Simionato try their hand at Magic, at Chez Geeks on St-Denis St.Vincenzo D'Alto
/ The Gazette

Frédéric Grenier, left, and Alex Dornier play a friendly game of Lost Cities, at Randolph Pub on Thursday January 09, 2014.Pierre Obendrauf
/ The Gazette

Randolph Pub’s collection is open to anyone who pays a $5 cover charge.Pierre Obendrauf
/ The Gazette

Left to right, Alex Steve Paquet, James Simionato, an employee, and David Sem play a game of Magic during a game night at Chez Geeks board game boutique in Montreal Monday January 6, 2014.Vincenzo D'Alto
/ The Gazette

A wall of board games in the library at Chez Geeks board game boutique in Montreal Monday January 6, 2014.Vincenzo D'Alto
/ The Gazette

Left to right, Alex Steve Paquet, James Simionato, an employee, Marcus Maedler and David Sem play a game of Magic during a game night at Chez Geeks board game boutique in Montreal Monday January 6, 2014.Vincenzo D'Alto
/ The Gazette

Left to right, Alex Steve Paquet, and James Simionato, an employee, play a game of Magic during a game night at Chez Geeks board game boutique in Montreal Monday January 6, 2014.Vincenzo D'Alto
/ The Gazette

A wall of board games in the library at Chez Geeks board game boutique in Montreal Monday January 6, 2014.Vincenzo D'Alto
/ The Gazette

Patrons of the Randolph Pub gather to play board games on Thursday January 09, 2014.Pierre Obendrauf
/ The Gazette

A wall of board games in the library at Chez Geeks board game boutique in Montreal Monday January 6, 2014.Vincenzo D'Alto
/ The Gazette

Myriam Pineault-Latreille, left, Kenza Chahlouni, Philippe Michaud and Sabrina Purcell play a round of That’s Life, one of the 1,300 games in Randolph Pub’s library.Pierre Obendrauf
/ The Gazette

Patrons of the Randolph Pub, Patrick Frey Laporte and Emmanuelle Fortier gather with friends to play board game Takenoko on Thursday January 09, 2014.Pierre Obendrauf
/ The Gazette

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Joel Gagnon and Benoît Gascon have played every single one of the 1,300 board games on the shelves at Randolph Pub. That’s a lot of time hunched...

MONTREAL — There’s a lineup at Randolph Pub every Friday and Saturday, and if the owners didn’t direct people to the bar next door while they wait to get in, it would run all the way down St-Denis St.

It’s not live music or a well-known DJ that the 20- and 30-somethings are after at this Latin Quarter venue. The pull is something old-school. It’s the allure of cardboard and dice — the board game.

Randolph Pub, which opened just a year and a half ago, is a bar where people pay a $5 cover charge to sit around playing one of the 1,300 games in the pub’s collection. No headphones, keypads or controllers.

In an era of video games and online entertainment, the old-fashioned board game is making a comeback. Across Europe, Asia and North America, board-game cafés like Randolph and Toronto’s Snakes & Lattés are hip new places to hang. Board-game sales are skyrocketing, too. Small, independent stores like Chez Geeks on St-Denis St. and Face to Face Games on Wellington St. in Verdun are doing brisk business alongside the toy-store giants. A game that catches on, thanks to word-of-mouth recommendations and good online reviews, can sell millions of copies a year.

As Peter Sachlas, the operations manager at Face to Face Games, puts it: “With social media and everyone glued to their Androids or iPhones, it’s nice to put those aside and sit face to face and spend time together.

“It’s not that we’ve stopped playing video games, it’s that we want the competitive aspect of gaming but also some human interaction,” Sachlas said. “We can be competitive, but we laugh and talk too.

“The more time you spend with someone, the closer you get, and when you play a two- or three-hour game, it brings you closer together.”

It’s not Monopoly, Clue, Trivial Pursuit or other games you played as a kid on rainy-day afternoons that are fuelling the board-game boom, though. Many of the new bestsellers, like The Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne, are collaborative games with simple rules that originated in Germany. Others, like Game of Thrones, are based on movies, television series or fantasy fiction. There are hardcore strategy games with nail-biting showdowns, and games that encourage co-operation rather than a solitary turn around a pale green board hoping to bankrupt your opponents.

In the game Pandemic, for example, two to four players work together as specialists trying to stop the worldwide spread of four deadly diseases. They have eight turns around the board to complete their mission, or the battle is lost and the board wins.

There are party games like Apples to Apples or Say Anything for playing with a drink in your hand, and family games like The Resistance that can accommodate as many as 20 players of all ages and skill levels. There are role-playing games with 10 pages of rules that take hours and hours to complete, and simple games of memory that are over and done in half an hour. And more than ever before, today’s so-called board games don’t always include boards, often based instead on cards or other features.

Luca Vince Caltabiano, a 32-year-old videographer who owns Chez Geeks along with his brother, Giancarlo, says the growing popularity of board games is a sign of a generation weaned on Xbox and PlayStation looking for real-world connection.

“Sitting down around a table and playing a game live with friends offers something that being alone with headphones on, sitting in front of a screen and playing people you will probably never, ever meet can never match,” said Caltabiano, who is also a game reviewer whose site, boardtodeath.tv, has over a million views. He has also designed his own board game, called CarmaRace; it was funded with $23,000 in investments through Kickstarter, the online crowdfunding platform for creative projects, and is now in production. (Investors who pledged $500 or more got to have a character in the game named after them.)

Caltabiano says the new games are more fun to play than their predecessors. Often, players play in teams. And there is what’s known in board-game circles as “continuous engagement,” which means that what’s happening when it’s not your turn matters to you. Sometimes players play against the board, so there are no winners or losers.

The 40-seat gaming room at Chez Geeks is open every day, and often it’s filled with board-game obsessives trying out a just-released title, deciding whether to add it to their collection.

“They buy board games not just to play, but to collect,” Caltabiano said. “It’s popular these days to have a board-game library.”

Over at Randolph Pub, Benoît Gascon, 28, and Joel Gagnon, 26, were shocked at how quickly their board-game bar took off and how diverse the clientele is. The pub is open every day from 4 p.m. Most evenings, both floors of their brick-and-wood establishment are filled with couples on a date, friends meeting up, or families celebrating a birthday (but not children — because it’s a bar where alcohol is served, patrons must be 18 or older).

Now they have branched out and begun a business that offers board-game activities for home and office parties, and they’ve been invited to bring their games to the Nuit Blanche festivities that close the Montréal en lumière festival on March 1.

The board-game craze arrived in Quebec around 2005, Gascon and Gagnon said, as such games as The Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne began to arrive from Germany, where they had developed a decade-old cult following. For Quebecers who had grown up on competitive board games like Monopoly or Battleship, the new co-operative Eurogames, as they are called, were a revelation.

“Anybody who has ever played Monopoly knows it’s anti-social. The whole point of the game is to eliminate all your rivals. Somebody always leaves the table in a huff,” said Gagnon, who calls Randolph Pub a Monopoly-free zone. (He’ll bring the board out from the back of the shelf only if a customer insists.)

But in the new games, which were pioneered by the German game developer Alex Randolph (the namesake of Randolph Pub), the interactions are meant to be fun. Often, as in The Settlers of Catan, everybody plays until the end, working together toward a communal goal.

Now, new American-style games are making their mark in the board-game world. Known as Ameritrash, such games as Battlestar Galactica, Axis & Allies and Runewars blend the collaborative principles of the European games with highly developed fantasy role-playing, and player-to-player conflict and war-game themes borrowed from video games.

“People thought board games were dead or dying and that video games had taken over the world,” Gagnon said. “But they are more alive, more popular than ever.”

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